Ex-MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom is going to raise AU$4.5 million for his new digital music service by taking it public on the Australian Securities Exchange by the end of the year. The potential investors have received a 41-page prospectus with the plans, which were also published on Baboom’s website. The company is going to issue up to 11.25 million shares at AU$0.40 each.

Baboom is a platform where artists can upload their music and make it available for fans to stream or download. Kim Dotcom soft-launched the site early in 2014 with a single artist: himself.

The prospectus sent out to potential investors outlined the strategy of blending streams, downloads, artist profile pages and social updates. Apparently, the musicians will be able to sell downloads along with giving them away, at the same time selling tickets and merchandise. The service also suggests that its visitors will earn “credits” for free music if they watch targeted ads, for storing their existing music collections in digital lockers up to 50GB, and for playing music from the website and mobile apps. Baboom will launch an “open (controlled) beta” in the III quarter of 2014, and a full launch is expected by the end of the year.

Nowadays, when such platforms as Spotify, Rdio and Pandora have set the standards for music streaming services, there is still a lot to do to make streaming fully replace other audio formats. Of course, Dotcom understands that Baboom is entering a crowded market, but the service is going to prosper by differentiating itself with lossless audio, in-depth artist profiling and backwards compatibility with legacy audio formats.

New music streaming service will initially be promoted to the 8.4 million users of Kim’s other venture, Mega storage service. It is going to make money from its 10% cut of music downloads sold through the service, along with advertising and subscriptions for “original, exclusive or first-listen material”.

According to the industry observers, if Baboom was being launched by anyone other than Dotcom, music labels and publishers would have been jumping at the chance to license it. But Kim’s background (he is still facing criminal and civil copyright infringement charges, and is fighting extradition to the US) is likely to put many content creators and copyright owners off Baboom. However, Dotcom is officially running neither Baboom nor Mega himself: the platform’s CEO is media and entertainment lawyer Grant Edmundson.